You mean Sgt. Doom was actually right about the tinfoil hats? Naw, can't believe that.

try not to think in words

After the Stranger finishes their production run of Stranger™ Occupy™ The Revolution™ Organic™ Bandannas™ (dark green on black for the downlow, ya know), they should really consider Stranger™ Tin Foil Berets™ (accented with French glitter).

@1: http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/orig…

Charles's paranoia notwithstanding, the potential applications of this technology are awesome. An interface monitoring sounds imagined by the brain could produce thought-to-speech for people like Roger Ebert. It could also possibly be used to analyze (and treat) certain medical conditions that cause problems with auditory processing in the brain.

Sounds like we need to reformulate the copyright laws.

An interesting potential, from my perspective, is that once we've accurately correlated words to specific neural activity, we can then account for those signals and move on to mapping related associations bound up with the ideas packaged within the words.

Future comparisons of emotions and non-linguistic imagery bound together round the same words --and whether they are linked to correlations or processed differently in the different brains of differing individuals-- will prove to be quite revealing.

I'd love to know if words with the same meaning light up the same parts of the brain for people born into different languages and cultures.

That is cool, because someday we'll be able to detect crimes before they happen... Somebody just thinking about boosting some Twinkies from 7-11 will be, uh, discouraged from doing so...

(Minority Report, anyone?)